Trump a ‘Dangerous Dictator’? Poll Reveals SHOCKING Views Among Americans

Yeah, pretend I'm on the ballot, right? This has been Trump's closing argument down the midterm elections to, like, say just, I mean, I think he's literally said, just close your eyes and imagine that I'm on the ballot, right, when you cast your ballot. So we thought, well, how's that going to go if that's, in fact, what people are doing? We had a question here. I want to be clear about this. E.J. mentioned that sometimes we ask questions that we know have a lean to them, and we do that on purpose. When we do that, we tend to pair them with another question on the other side, right? So we basically said we're going to read you two questions, tell us which of these that you agree with. That's what we did in this question. I've only got one side of the question up here to make the patterns clear. But we asked people, do you think that Trump is a potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy? That's clearly a leaning question. Or on the other side, do you think he's a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to make America great again? So that was the statement on the other side. And whenever we give paired statements, it's also important we actually rotate them randomly. So we never let – so respondents might get one – one respondent might get one first. The other respondent is going to get another one first to balance out whatever trailing effects it might be by getting one question in front of the other one. Here's – so we asked this question in 2025, and we've actually seen an uptick here among all Americans. A year ago, it was 52%. Today, it is 58% in the general population. And here are the partisan breaks on that. You'll see independents in particular have gone up from 56 to 64 percent on this question. Democrats were already pretty much at the ceiling. They've ticked up a tiny bit, but they're up around 90 percent. And one in five Republicans, actually, side with this question versus the other question. But here you can see that independents are kind of up above the mean and a little closer to Democrats than they are to Republicans on this question. One thing I will point out here that I don't have a slide on, but a pattern to kind of watch out for, I'm going to flag in a minute. One interesting group in this election is Latino Protestants in the country. This is a group that has historically voted for Trump, about 6 in 10, every time he's been on the ballot. Latino Catholics tend to vote about 7 in 10 Democrat, but Latino Protestants tend to vote Republican. uh latino protestants on this question are now 62 percent uh saying that they are more likely to agree with the statement that trump is a potentially dangerous dictator so that's notable for a group that voted six and ten for him uh in 2024 all right well welcome everyone uh welcome back that's i see a lot of familiar faces um already and many of you have been on this journey with us over the last uh 17 years i can always keep up with it because the survey is one year older than my son all right um so i i kind of know right where we are uh so you've seen that the hefty report i'm sure you've all read it uh between the time you picked it up and and now um but i'm going to hit the highlights um as you know i move a little quickly um i will try to be clear but i'm going to move quickly through it so we can get to our discussion and i'm really just going to hit the highlights there's so much here uh this report spans 70 pages all kinds of charts and graphs and and insights. So there'll be a lot more to look at as you go. And again, the report is at prri.org online. Okay, so darkening mood. I'm going to start with that and where we are. This is going to maybe come as a surprise to no one here. But oh, just so you know, so this is a fairly large survey. It's over 5,500 respondents from a random probability sample here. Our margin for the full sample 1.6 percentage points plus or minus uh this long-standing partnership with brookings institution and melissa has mentioned uh the andrew carnegie foundation the ford foundation Wilbur and Hilda Glenn Family Foundation and the Unitarian Universalist Beach Program at Shelter Rock who made this possible so thank you uh for that all right so where are we uh here um this i'm going to open with the darkening mood thing this is the percent of people in these groups who say the country is headed in the wrong direction, right? So on the bottom, the economy, it is 76% of the country that says the economy is heading in the wrong direction. The way the U.S. is dealing with other countries, 70% wrong direction. The way the federal government is dealing with undocumented immigrants, 62% wrong direction, right? So here, this will not also surprise you. Here are Democrats on all three of those issues, right? A nearly unanimous word across the board. Independents are actually not far behind independents on these measures. I think this is really notable. Eight in 10 independents, for example, saying the economy is heading in the wrong direction. Here are Republicans, much less. But I will point this out. On the economy and the way the U.S. is dealing with other countries, if we go back two years ago, we had the same question on here. The number of Republicans saying the country's heading in the wrong direction has, in fact, doubled, right? So that's notable, I think, here, that this movement, particularly 52 percent of Republicans saying the economy's heading in the wrong direction, really notable. So what issues are driving the country as we're heading into the midterm elections? We had a battery of 10 critical issues on the survey. I've only got here the ones is that either Democrats, Republicans, or independents were a majority, said they were critical. So I haven't put anything that didn't reach that majority point. Here are Democrats. I'm going to put them up first. As you can see, cost of housing expenses, electing leaders of good moral character, opposing President Trump's agenda, all very, very tightly aligned. Healthcare, two-thirds there on all these issues. The war in Iran, also fairly high on the agenda. I'm going to drop independents here next. You can see they're also very strong on the top two, electing leaders of good moral character, cost of housing. The other one that really drops up another economic issue here is health care, a little bit lower on the other issues. Here are Republicans. There are only three things that show up in majority territory, agreeing cost of housing and everyday expenses. Interestingly enough, electing leaders of good moral character, and down at the bottom, immigration. Now, on immigration, this is a critical issue and are largely still supportive of the President's immigration agenda. So this is kind of a positive. On the electing leaders of good moral character, it turns out when you look at it and look at support for Trump, there's very little difference between those who have favorable views of Trump and those who have unfavorable views of Trump on this. So it actually doesn't impact their view of Trump on this particular measure. All right, so we also have some measures here about economic populism and this conversation that is going on around whether socialism in the United States. And so, first of all, just on economic populism, and we have a whole battery of measures in the survey, so I'm just going to give you a couple here to kind of simplify it. One is just a straightforward evaluation, nearly impossible today for working families to make ends meet. The second one is more about, like, is the system rigged? The economy is rigged against working Americans to benefit the rich and the powerful. You can see at the general population level, 7 and 10, no difference. Like, agree on both of these accounts. I'm going to kind of run through here. And on this one, I'm going to look at racial and ethnic differences. Again, African Americans, 8 and 10 on both counts. Latinos, again, about three quarters on both counts. multiracial Americans. It's a little bit lower on the rigged side, but still 7 in 10 support AAPI, very similar findings. And you can see it drops a little bit for white Americans. Interestingly enough, even if we look underneath white Americans at non-college and college-educated white Americans, the differences are actually not that big. And that's a little bit unusual that you would expect to see much bigger differences. We don't actually see that many, no large differences there. All right. So socialism, right? This has been something new. Again, there's always one great thing about this survey is that as the country moves, there's always questions you didn't really think you'd need to ask at some previous point. And this is one of them here. So we decided to kind of try to see if people were talking past each other is one way to think of it. What do people mean when they use the word socialism? Like what's in their head when they're throwing that around? So we had two different definitions here, and which one do you agree with? Socialism is best understood as a system in which the government, statement one, provides benefits such as health insurance, retirement support, and access to free higher education, or, statement two, controls major parts of the economy, such as utilities, transportation, communications, and banks. And as you can see here, there's quite a bit of difference between what Democrats and Republicans seem to mean when they use the word socialism. So Democrats overwhelmingly pick the first one. It's the government providing benefits to Americans. Republicans, on the other hand, if I put the other side of it up here, you can see two-thirds think the other thing. It's the government controlling parts of the economy. So part of what's going on is really just this, very different perceptions of socialism when that word is thrown around without defining it. So that's really important to keep in mind. Here's the same question broken down by religion. And basically what you see is that the religious coalitions that vote tend to lean Democrat line up with Democrats and the religious coalition that tends to lean Republican line up slightly the other way. White evangelicals really here staking out the other side, very strongly saying they think it's the second thing controlling parts of the economy. Now, we also ask that's a kind of an underlying conceptual question. We also asked a question about whether people saw different movements to be a serious threat to the country. And we asked about the Democratic Socialists of America, and we asked about the MAGA movement in this question, among some other things. But these two I want to kind of put up side by side. It turns out that as a whole, Americans, almost half of Americans that say the Make America Great Again movement poses a serious threat to the country. 36% say the same of the Democratic Socialists of America. This will not be surprising that this is what Republicans look like, but this is what independents look like on this question. A slim majority saying the MAGA movement, about a third looked like there, and here's what Democrats look like on this measure. So again, you can see here this kind of partisan split on which of these movements are a threat to the country all right so uh yeah the caption yeah pretend i'm on the ballot right this has been trump's closing argument uh down the midterm elections or to like say just i mean i think he's literally said just close your eyes and imagine that i'm on the ballot right when you're gonna when you cast your ballot so uh we thought well how's that gonna go um if that's in fact what people are doing um we had a question here i want to be clear about this ej mentioned that sometimes we ask questions that we know have a lean uh to them and we do that and on purpose When we do that, we tend to pair them with another question on the other side, right? So we basically say, we're going to read you two questions, tell us which of these that you agree with. That's what we did in this question. I've only got one side of the question up here to make the patterns clear. But we ask people, do you think that Trump is a potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy? That's clearly a leaning question, right? Or on the other side, do you think he's a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to make America great again like so that was the statement on the other side and whenever we give paired statements it's also important we actually rotate them randomly so uh we never let so one respondent might get one first the other response going to get another one first to balance out whatever trailing effects it might be by getting one question uh in front of the other one um here's um so we asked this question in 2025 uh and we've actually seen an uptick here among all Americans. A year ago, it was 52 percent. Today, it is 58 percent in the general population. And here are the partisan breaks on that. You'll see independents in particular have gone up from 56 to 64 percent on this question. Democrats were already pretty much at the ceiling. They've ticked up a tiny bit, but they're up around 90 percent. And one in five Republicans, actually, side with this question versus the other question. But here you can see you know, that independents are kind of up above the mean and a little closer to Democrats than they are to Republicans on this question. One thing I will point out here that I don't have a slide on, but a pattern to kind of watch out for, and we'll flag in a minute. One interesting group in this election is Latino Protestants in the country. This is a group that has historically voted for Trump about six in ten every time he's been on the ballot. Latino Catholics tend to vote about 7 in 10 Democrat, but Latino Protestants tend to vote Republican. Latino Protestants on this question are now 62 percent saying that they are more likely to agree with the statement that Trump is a potentially dangerous dictator. So that's notable for a group that voted 6 in 10 for him in 2024. Here is favorability, and I'm just going to show you the delta here, the difference in favorability between 2024 and 2026 across the kind of seven-point spread of partisanship. You can see that among the strong Republicans, not a lot of drop, but among the leaners, it's about a 10-point drop in Trump favorability. Even among the leaners, here are independents, 20-point drop in Trump favorability over the last two years. Not a lot of movement among Democrats because they were already overwhelmingly, they were already in single digits favorability for Trump. But that independent number, again, in the middle is quite something, 20 points across the way. Here's the same question, same analysis, but with religious groups. Notably, white evangelical Protestants, his strongest defender, voted 8 in 10 for him every time he's been on the ballot, are now at 62 percent favorability. So even after a 10-point drop, they're still at 62. So I should point that out, right? They're still overwhelmingly with the president, hereby a margin of more than two to one. But you'll see white non-evangelical Protestants dropped nearly 10 points. White Catholics, not that much. But here's that group. There's Latino Protestants on this question, right? 20 points over the last two years. All right. So we're here. We're all thinking about the midterms. We're just about a dozen days out from the midterms. Due excitement first. So among those who are registered to vote that we're looking here and say they're going to vote. So these are likely voters. We do see the Democrats have an excitement edge, right? That's how excited are you to be voting in the upcoming midterm elections. Here, you can see independents a little less. That's pretty typical. But it looks like Democrats have a slight excitement edge, particularly among the very excited. It's 46-31 among the very excited people among Democrats here. And here is actually our election kind of ballot. you know, are you likely to vote for the Democratic candidate in your district or the Republican candidate in your district? And we're showing basically a seven-point spread between Democrats with Democrats holding an advantage. We did check this with a more recent poll just to make sure it basically hasn't moved that much since we were in the field. Here's Republicans, though, 83 percent saying they're going to vote for the Republican candidate. And I'm going to put them all three up here. On the flip side, 89 percent of Democrats saying they're going to vote for the Democratic candidate. But the independents here, you'll see about a 15-point advantage here between Democrats over Republicans. So this bodes well, I think, for Democrats in the midterms election. Now, we've heard a lot about election integrity and worried about, you know, if the election is going to be free and fair and all of that. Here's a real divide in the country that we, what is the biggest problem we're facing, right, in terms of like election integrity? There are two very different ideas in the country today. The country is basically divided between these two things. Do you think the biggest problem is, statement one, people casting votes who are not eligible to vote, in other words, voter fraud, or statement two, eligible voters being denied the right to vote, right? And the country is basically split here, but you will see this massive partisan divide on this question. We have Republicans overwhelmingly here. You know, it's 78 and 10 saying that it is people casting votes who are not eligible to vote. Independents, a little more divided, but leaning toward the eligible voters being denied the right to vote. And the Democrats overwhelmingly on the other side. So we've got a partisan big divide about even what the biggest problem we're facing is in the upcoming election. Here it is just divided by race. And the main thing I want to point out here is how different African-Americans look here. It's only 25% saying that the biggest problem is people casting votes not eligible to vote. Overwhelmingly saying it's no eligible voters being denied the right to vote. That is the biggest problem. So here is a question that I think we should pay some attention to. And we had two questions here that basically were if serious voter fraud is suspected, the president should, and these are two separate questions, but I've got them here on the same chart. order federal agents to seize the ballots and take over the vote counting or postpone the 2026 midterm elections for Congress so we see what people say here's here's the one i uh 58 of Republicans uh say that uh they would be supportive of the president uh ordering federal agents to seize the ballots and take over the vote counting if serious uh voter fraud was suspected um in the midterm elections um but only 34 percent uh or would support postponing the the the midterm elections. Independents, not much support there at all. And Democrats, as you can see, less than one in five on either one of these questions. But that 58% number, I think, is one we should pay attention to. Now, in every election, there's always this language about the God gap historically between Democrats and Republicans. It tends to go, the more you attend church, the more likely you are to vote Republican. I have been doing battle with this interpretation for a dozen years at least i'm going to continue that battle by just sort of like pointing this out that yes there's some truth to that statement but it mostly pertains to white christians right that is where the god gap exists it is true among white christians that the more you go to church the more likely you are to be to vote republican that's largely because it's also the more likely you are to be evangelical um if you go to church more often so you can see it up here in the top one if you just look at the top um yes absolutely uh those who attend weekly or more only 19 percent likely to vote for the democratic candidate uh attend seldom or never though it's it's about half among white white americans let's go and put the other side up so that's clearly there uh among latino voters though even if you look at the um attend weekly or more um they're just basically divided with a slight lean uh toward republicans uh but so the pattern is there but it's not nearly as high uh and it doesn't really get you even into majority republican territory even among the uh attend weekly but note african-american voters like it is absolutely flat right there's there's no so-called god gap uh among african-americans attendance makes very little difference uh in uh in in how they how they vote here what i think is maybe more important for this uh election is what uh we've dubbed the empathy gap uh here so many of you may have seen there is um there's a number of books out now uh attacking empathy uh as a sin as suicidal as toxic um and and these are uh i see some headlines people looking around like, what? Yeah, so this is actually happening in particularly an evangelical circle. So we decided to ask a question about this. And again, we did this kind of paired statement thing. Empathy is a foundational, so which of these do you agree with? Empathy is a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society, or empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God's truth. And we took that language out of this debate that's been happening here. And you can actually see there's kind of a partisan divide on this question. So these are people who agree with the first statement, that empathy is a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society. Republicans are still in majority territory agreeing with that, but it's low majority, 54%. And you can see that it's actually not just about partisanship. It's actually about a connection to Trump and the MAGA movement, right? That among those, even among Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump, they're much less likely to agree with that statement than republicans who have unfavorable views of trump which look basically like independents um on the question so here's the other side of it right you can see um among republicans it is uh 38 percent uh now nearly four and ten who picked the second uh statement but that's not really where i mean among republicans is you can see the traction where it's really gained traction is among white evangelical protestants because this is where that debate has really been um uh gone and now we find actually uh that today it is a majority um it's 54% of white evangelicals who affirm that second statement right that empathy has become can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by god's truth they're the only religious group in the country that that is true for um every other religious group is basically about two-thirds the other direction uh picking the empathy as a foundational moral value but that shift or this movement so that white evangelicals now are suspicious of the idea of empathy, I think is really notable. And I'm quite sure we'll hear more about that. It's also driven quite strongly by views on Christian nationalism. In fact, it's fairly linear here that you kind of stair-steppy that, you know, Christian nationalism adherence, those who believe that Christians should exercise dominion over the U.S., that U.S. laws should be based on the Bible, etc., are much more likely to say that empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God's truth. And you can see that the further you go up, the more you reject that worldview, the more you are likely to embrace empathy as a foundational moral value. All right, next to the last section here, I'll wrap up. One of the questions we've been asking really all the way back from the beginning is this question about what to do about immigrants who are living in the country illegally, right? This is obviously the forefront of our politics today. We've been asking this question all along. Our question has always given them three options. We should provide them a path to citizenship, provided they meet certain requirements. We should not allow them to become citizens, but give them some kind of legal status. Or three, we should identify and deport them. And so we give all three of those options. This is the side of picking the first one. there should be a pathway to citizenship here. And as you can see, both among all Americans and independents, despite the way that this has been used as a political football, particularly over the last decade, it's remained fairly constant. But here's what's happened in the partisanship side. At its tightest in 2014, there was only a 14-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on this question of a path to citizenship. And it was about half of Republicans that said yeah, that seems to be the right way forward, that 14-point gap has become a 42-point gap among partisans. In our most recent survey, you can just see this yawning gap opening up here. And part of what's driving that is I'm going to do the same question just on white evangelical to present and show you all three options. The first one is allowed a way to become citizens. You can see the drop, right? Back when we were first asking this, it was a majority of white evangelicals who said, yes, we should allow them a path to citizenship here. Here is the second option, the kind of permanent legal residence. That's never been a favorite option. On this last one, though, identify and deport them is where you can really see the difference. And I've put a trend line on here just so you can see it. But now that has become the preferred option among white evangelical Protestants that identify and deport them. It's gone from 30 percent to 47 percent here. So that has really been the sea change in Republican and white evangelical politics on this thing. One other question here that we've been tracking about whether the federal government should detain immigrants who are in the country illegally in internment camps until they can be deported. It's about a third of the country that agrees with that policy, but it is six in ten Republicans, twice as many Republicans who agree with that policy. It's 28% of Democrats and it's only sorry 28% of independents 16% of Democrats And this is one of those kind of asymmetric polarization things where Independents much closer to Democrats and Republicans really in a very different place on this particular question Oh, I know what happened to my labels here That's odd. Okay. Well, I'll tell you what these are. I just rehearsed this So we had we had a question where we asked about whether what kind of a country we wanted to be in terms of foreign policy and the two statements? were I prefer the U.S. to be known as and the blue here is this statement a reliable neighbor neighbor that only uses military force as a last resort the green statement is a mighty nation that does not hesitate to use military force to defend its interests right and so you can see the patterns here this is Democrat Independent Republican Democrats overwhelmingly more than eight and ten saying they'd like the u.s. to be a reliable neighbor that only uses military force as a last resort and this is six and ten down here on the bottom bottom of Republicans saying, no, we prefer it to be a mighty nation that does not hesitate to use military force to defend its interests. All right. Finally, I try to let, as you know, I always try to find some little consensus or agreement to find our way here amid all the polarization. So here it is. There is really strong agreement about reform for what elected officials and for anti-corruption measures here with elected officials. So the three things, using public office to um also these are uh things that should be illegal like not legal uh using public office to financially benefit themselves or members of the family drawing maps voting maps to give their own political party an advantage so gerrymandering buying or selling individual stocks while in office and uh there's one slide on here that does not have a big partisan divide right on there and so it is overwhelmingly democrats republicans independents all say yeah yeah all of this should be illegal um uh and uh and kind joining hands across the divides here on that. So I'm going to leave it right there and we will jump into the next phase of the program. Thank you.